To Infidelity and Back | Page 5

school
to prepare for the ministry without first joining a church or signing a
creed. For a person in my state of mind nothing better could have

presented itself. I determined to go there and make a thorough study of
the Bible and all the different religious bodies, and to fearlessly follow
the truth wherever it might lead me.
The time came and I entered the school. And a fine school it was from
an intellectual standpoint and for the purpose of investigation. I have
been a student at six educational institutions since I left the high school,
but this was far ahead of the others for the development of the logical
and philosophical faculties. Here there was absolutely no restraint to
thought; and all kinds of systems and ideas were represented, from
philosophical anarchy to socialism and from mysticism to materialism.
The moral and spiritual earnestness I expected to find among the
Unitarians I did not find, especially among the younger and more
radical ones. Its effect, on the whole, was to relax rather than intensify
the moral fiber. Their ideals seemed so grand and noble that I thought
those possessed with them could scarcely find time to eat and sleep in
their zeal to put them into practise; but I discovered that they not only
had plenty of time to eat and sleep, but also for dancing, card-playing,
theater-going, etc. Many of the young men studying for the ministry
often spent a large part of the night in card-playing, and the
Sunday-school room served also as a dancing-floor. Unitarians pride
themselves upon the high standard of morality among their people and
upon the few prisoners you find among their members, but this is due
to the character of the people they reach rather than to the restraining
influence of their teaching
My reading had given me a wrong impression as to the teaching of
Unitarianism. Like many others, I was fascinated and enticed by the
writings of conservative Unitarians, whose contention is largely against
the bad theology of human creeds; but the present-day teaching of the
vanguard of Unitarianism is an entirely different thing. It rejects all the
miraculous in the Bible, and, in many cases, even denies the existence
of a personal God. All the students were required to conduct chapel
prayers in turn. Those who did not believe in a personal God explained
that they were pronouncing an apostrophe to the great impersonal and
unknowable force working in the universe. I had read Channing, Clark,
Hale, Emerson, and other conservative Unitarians, and found much

food for my soul, but I discovered that these were considered old
"fogies" and back numbers by most of the students in attendance.
But I must tell you of my evolution along the line of rationalism. My
rationalistic proclivities were given a free rein. And as a child, when
left to run away, will soon stop and return to its mother, so this freedom
was the natural cure for my intellectual delusion. To the statement of
the creeds, "The Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost
is God; and yet there are not three Gods, but one God," my rationalism
replied, that is logically inconceivable, therefore I became a Unitarian.
No sooner was I happy in this faith than a Universalist addressed me
and said, "If you want to be rational, you must give up your belief in
eternal punishment, for God could not give eternal punishment for a
finite sin." As a rationalist, what could I do but yield, and so I became a
universalist Unitarian. I felt I had at last found the truth, but my peace
was short; for a student accused me of being irrational, "because," said
he, "an omnipotent, loving God would give an infinitely large amount
of good and an infinitely small amount of evil; but an infinitely small
amount of evil is not perceptible, evil is perceptible, therefore there is
no such God." This was an awful pill and gave a terrible shock to my
religious sensibilities, but as rationalism was my guide, I had to follow
on or stand accused as a superstitious coward.
Again rationalism declared, through my teachers, that all the
supernatural must be eliminated from the Bible as mythical and
unreliable, and so I was robbed of my Christ, my God and my Bible.
Misguided by rationalism, I thought it my conscientious duty to accept,
step by step, the dictates of destructive criticism until the Bible was
only inspired to me in religion as Kant in philosophy, Milton in poetry,
and Beethoven in music. But when I came to the end of the matter I
discovered that my conscience, which had urged me along, was gone
also. For I was gravely taught that conscience is merely a creature